Many are worried about the wrong health risks...

Today's Post: Tuesday, 7-19-2011

In a recent news article the most worried-about health risks were cancer and memory loss in a survey of baby boomers.

But the dangers of the related categories of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity actually contained far more risk.

Oddly, a different recent news story on how good health habits protect people from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of mental decline suggests that may be OK.

Why is that?

The habits that tended to cause mental decline they listed as smoking, depression, low education, diabetes, too little exercise, obesity and high blood pressure.

Other than low education, the good health habits for these factors are almost identical to those for the second group that has more risk.

1. If you stop smoking and begin to relentlessly avoid second hand smoke, your level of heart disease and heart attack risk stops going up and begins to go down sharply. (That’s the BIG risk of smoking. ALL smokers and those exposed to second hand smoke get that one!)

But that also makes your circulation to your brain better which prevents vascular dementia and helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease

If you have high blood pressure and begin to avoid tobacco smoke, it gets lower overall. It gets much lower during the times each day you were exposed to tobacco smoke before. That too cuts your heart attack risk. It also cuts your risk of stroke which can cause brain damage or severe brain damage.

What about cancer? True some people smoke and die of something else—often heart disease. BUT, a full fourth of heavy smokers get lung cancer. And tobacco smoke causes 30% or more of ALL cancers – NOT just lung cancer. It couldn’t be clearer. If you’d rather not get cancer, avoid tobacco smoke!

2. What about exercise? Something like 75% of Americans don’t get the minimum needed for good health.

If each week, you do at least two sessions of strength training with a day of rest in between; at least three sessions of interval cardio with a day of rest in between; AND if you can, also do more moderate exercise equal to a few miles of walking, ideally 5 or 6 miles a more a week, your risk of everything on this list goes down.

It’s not easy to get into or keep doing this. But by exercising first thing in the morning at home and breaking it into 10, 15, 20, or 30 minute sessions, you can fit it in on most days.

Also do the other thing that makes continuing to do exercise dramatically easier.

Keep a record -- using abbreviations to make it quick -- to enter what you did every day to show what exercise you did. You can see if you do too little. And you can also see that if you almost always exercise, the few days you really have to skip aren’t that bad.

It’s also fun when you gradually can do more. You can SEE the improvement in your records. (I just did my Nordic Track at a low, easy effort to avoid getting my wife’s cold. Then I happened to see that was equal to my best effort results from just a couple of years ago!)

The other two alternatives that work are to replace some TV watching with exercise some evenings a week or to get in your moderate exercise by riding an exercise bike or walking on a treadmill while watching the lighter TV programs you watch.

If people knew what exercise did FOR them and what not exercising did TOO them, few would be without it!

It protects against the ALL the big worries.

Because this kind of exercise dramatically slows aging, it keeps your immune system young and strong and helps prevent cancers. (That works even better if you also take antioxidant vitamins and supplements and get antioxidants in vegetables and fruit that you eat.)

Because this kind of exercise improves your circulation and helps prevent or improve high blood sugar AND triggers the growth of new brain cells, it also prevents vascular dementia and helps prevent or slow Alzheimer’s disease.

Exercise also helps prevent the other big risks.

It lowers high blood pressure. It helps prevent obesity or make it easier to get rid of. It directly reduces your risk of heart attack and stroke if you do it right. Recent studies even found the longer you exercise & do it every week regularly without a break of more than a few days the better your protection gets!

Vigorous exercise and moderate exercise you enjoy or do with people you like, helps prevent or stop depression. So it makes you feel better and removes that cause of mental decline too.

(Your feel-good neurotransmitters go up, your circulation to your brain goes up, you get distracted mentally from your worries, and in doing the exercises you learn proactive skills that help you escape or solve problems!)

As the study we posted on recently found, exercise also prevents you from overreacting to stress and makes you much more resilient.

Few people go without sleep or water or food or air for very long! They can feel the effects quite quickly.

In the world people evolved in, exercise was inescapable. So we don’t have a similar system to let us know we are at risk from too little of it.

But the effects of not exercising regularly are quite serious.

So, no matter what health risks you’d like to avoid, if you exercise every week, your risks will drop!

3. The other factor you can fix to prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure is what you eat and drink.

It’s not yet well known. But ingesting too many sugars and high glycemic foods and NOT eating nonstarchy vegetables and whole fruit of many kinds, causes everything you’d like to avoid.

When you eat that way, your HDL goes down and your LDL and triglycerides go up which we now know causes heart disease. Worse, I read recently when you eat or drink too many sugars and boost your triglycerides, your HDL stops protecting you as its particles also become small enough to damage your artery walls.

You get blood sugar surges and mood swings which make avoiding depression harder. Those cause cravings for more of the same and the insulin surges that this triggers help make you get fat and stay that way.

They also boost your blood sugar level which, along with no vigorous, regular exercise, helps cause type 2 diabetes.

And, when your blood sugar goes up too high it sticks to your LDL and turns it into something like superglue particles which then destroy some of your capillaries and harms the inside of your larger blood vessels and begins to clog them up too.

This decreases blood circulation to your brain and is even thought to trigger the deposits and damage of Alzheimer’s disease.

So it’s a good news -- bad news picture.

The good news is that no matter what health risks concern you, 90 % of the key ways to protect yourself are the same.

Avoid tobacco smoke as close to 100 % as you can manage.

Exercise most days of every week.

And, eat and drink real foods instead of fast foods, soft drinks, packaged snacks, and packaged and commercially made desserts.

Each of these in today’s world takes an extra effort to do.

But the more you know WHY to do it and the more you learn it and the better you get at doing it, two great things happen.

It begins to be your new normal lifestyle and feel comfortable to you. And you find ways to enjoy parts of it.

And, your health improves dramatically while all your health risks drop like a stone!